The Rise of the Productized Service and Possibly the Easiest Way to Make Your First Million With Augie Johnston | TNE087

The Rise of the Productized Service and Possibly the Easiest Way to Make Your First Million | TNE087

Did you know there’s a way for you to make massive profit aside from traditional ecommerce, or taking the time to build your own personal brand or deal with the myriad of potential problems that come with running a service-based agency? In this week’s episode, I am joined by a very special guest who has seen success in this emerging opportunity. Augie Johnston is the founder of video editing service Vidchops. Before this, he played professional basketball in Germany before becoming a Youtuber. 

Today, Vidchops is taking over the Youtube community by storm, and now counts several major Youtube personalities as clients. Now you may be wondering how exactly Augie did it? That’s exactly what we talk about in this episode! This episode just might help you make your first million through ecomm. 

Timestamps:

[3:33]How Augie Started His EComm Journey

[6:38]Why Augie Didn’t Go for the Basketball Nice in YouTube

[10:57] Augie Weighs In on the Current Status of Service-based Businesses

[14:52]This is What Will Make A Business Succeed In Any Saturated Industry

[26:00]What does Augie do when he’s not working on his business?

Augie’s links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vidchops

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ballerbootcamp/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ballerbootcamp

Vidchops: https://vidchops.com/

Omar's (Host) Social Media:

Instagram - @nomadables

TikTok - @nomadables

Facebook Group - NOMADABLES - Accountability & Growth Community for Remote Workers- Perfect to meet fellow online entrepreneurs, remote workers, and digital nomads.

YouTube - Omar Mo

LinkedIn - Omar Mo Nomads Cast

Twitter - @nomadables

Pintrest - @nomadables

Clubhouse - @pods

WEBSITE: https://www.nomadables.com/

Transcript

The Rise of the Productized Service and Possibly the Easiest Way to Make Your First Million | TNE087

Omar  

Everyone's so focused on ecomm and personal brands when it comes to making money online, don't you think? And yes, of course, it can definitely work. 

However, I've got my own personal opinions on different online business models. And I have to say, the agency slash service delivery models are my favorite. Let me tell you why. 

Ecomm has meager margins, and you're generally at the whims of ad platforms if you haven't built up a personal brand. Personal brands require a long time to be built up and aren't profitable from day one. However, when they do become profitable courses and other digital products can make you millions. 

Then, of course, we have online service based agencies, which to be honest, has its own set of problems like clients, employees, depending on the way you look at it, of course. But in my eyes has a perfect amount of challenge and profitability to it. It's straightforward, you gain a set of skills, and you make money, aren't really ever in the negative, and it's definitely sustainable. 

However, there's actually another level of this that I learned about recently, just in the past six months or so. It's called a productized service. And the market potential for this is massive. There's so much opportunity, in fact, that my team and I have been building our own platform with a productized service behind the scenes now for about four months. 

Of course, I don't want to mention it until it's a finished product. However, I'm sure I'll be making an announcement on this podcast within the next month or two.

Today, we're joined by Augie Johnston, a former basketball player and massive Youtuber left his personal brand and decided to create his own productize service platformVidchops. 

Vidchops is a productized editing service for YouTubers and the way Auggie has built the business is absolutely phenomenal. Tune in to understand why him and I really geek out about the productize way of doing things and how there's a whole market out there for you to profit from as well. 

Remember Nomad fam, we've got some incredibly value filled episodes planned out for you so please hit that subscribe button and leave a review. Your review helps us podcast become more visible and ultimately inspire more people just like you. My name is Omar Mo and this is The Nomadic Executive.

Intro  

You're listening to The Nomadic Executive hosted by Omar from nomadables.com. Join Omar as he sits down and speaks with leading online entrepreneurs, remote workers and digital nomads about everything from business strategy to travel and lifestyle design.Together, we're here to help you achieve a life of happiness, health and freedom. And now here's your host, Omar Mo.

Omar  

All right Augie from California owner and founder of Vidchops, an incredible video editing and done for you service that helps youtubers really grow their own channel because Augie actually comes from a background of having his own massive YouTube channel. 

He's built this awesome service with over 30 plus employees, all working hard to get people's videos out there. He's in charge for many channels out there pushing out about six 600 to 800 videos a month, currently, and only seeing foreseeable growth in the future. So Auggie, why don't you go ahead and give my audience a little elevator pitch about who you are and who are you, you know, back in the day?

Augie Johnston  

Sure, I'll take you back to how this whole thing got started. And let's go back to 2009. Okay, so over 10 years ago, I was actually just finishing up college and I wanted to go play basketball in Europe, like a lot of college basketball players who are not good enough to go to the NBA want to do. And I was far from the end. That's what I did. 

And while I was in Europe, I wasn't getting paid a lot of money to play basketball to be honest. And I wanted to kind of come up with a second income stream. I had one basketball practice a day, maybe two, two to four hours of work a day. And so I had all this free time and I was living in in Germany at the time. So I was like, What could I do? I don't speak German. 

So I found a few different things. I started doing little basketball training lessons for kids, obviously, that was a few bucks here and there. And one day, I you know, was just sitting there and I was watching a lot of YouTube actually in this you know, 2009 YouTube was not all that great back then. And so that's what I was using that early. Yeah. And so I used my that was my TV replacement. And I'm sitting there watching YouTube and I'm like, man, I want to get a little side hustle going and so I do a little Google Search how to make money online and and that kind of started the whole journey for me in this entrepreneurship world and I decided to grow an audience on YouTube and create basketball training tutorials. 

And so I would record these videos in the summer I would do what's called batch recording where we'd record literally like 50 videos in the summer and I go back to Europe during the year and I would release these videos one by one on YouTube every week and I started growing my audience there. 

I also dove headfirst into really just digital marketing and all that kind of stuff. And I throughout the years, I grew that YouTube channel to 200,000 subscribers. 20 million views, I built a huge email list of over 50,000 emails, and I launched 11 products. So that was the kicker there. If you don't know you don't make a lot of money on YouTube through AdSense, through the ads. 

You can. There's some people out there that make pretty they're doing like 50 million views a month that can make crazy money with that. But it's really like the back end business, right? Like, how are you monetizing your YouTube channel? 

And yeah, that's what I did. I had 11 products, and some are physical, some are digital. And yeah, so that was my, my, my intro to the entrepreneurship world. And just to wrap that up and come full circle, I saw the need for video editing, I was editing a ton of videos, I'd come out with a new product that was be like 40 videos, and I'd be editing 40 videos before that. And so I was like, hey, there's this need for video editing. Let me see if I can try to solve that for YouTubers. And that's when I launched Vidchops, which is a video editing service for YouTubers.

Omar  

Sure. So before we dive in a Vidchops here, I got two questions for you. First one is a pretty mandatory question. Seeing how you're in the basketball field. How tall are you?

Augie Johnston  

I'm six two, I'm not too tall.

Omar  

Right. You're not the tallest basketball player? 

Augie Johnston  

For sure. Yeah, it's funny with the height of six two, you are tall in the normal realm of normal world, right? So I walk down people say Oh, you're so tall, Oh, you're this tall. This but then in the basketball world you're like this sort of the shortest guy on the team, yeah.

Omar  

Makes sense. Okay. And the second question is, you created Vidchops. But you had this personal brand built up to about 200,000 people, you were playing a sport that I at least think you love and you're creating a bunch of content around it, you had an email list of 50,000 a couple different products. 

So it's not like you were making measly money, you were probably making some good money at that point. If you continue down that path, you probably would have gotten an upward trajectory and the way YouTube works, eventually, probably a million subs all in the basketball niche. Why did you decide to go a different way?

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, there's a lot of reasons. One was that my basketball career had ended. I was like, Okay, I'm ready to move back home. I was out there for about seven years playing. I'd come back in the summers, obviously. But that was one thing. So I was, all sudden, my kind of my flow of my life had changed. I was coming home in the summer, I was shooting all these videos, I was going overseas playing basketball. 

So all sudden, that had changed. But honestly, I just kind of got burnt out. And you'll hear if you stick around the YouTube scene a lot long enough, you'll see a lot of YouTubers actually do end up burning out. And it's a combination of having to sit behind the keyboard and edit the video, it's reply to comments, do the emails, it's a combination of that. 

And just like a writer's block, I really felt like I had creative block there too. And I was, when I moved back, I was sticking with it. I was creating vlogs I was dabbling. I was in a few different video ideas, stuff like that, trying some other stuff and creating content that I thought was much better. But I was not getting the traction with that stuff. And it really had gone like from an upward trajectory as far as my channel growth and stuff to a plateau. 

Omar  

Sure.

Augie Johnston  

All that combined the plateau with the creative block with the burning out of editing. This made me say what's next?

Omar  

Sure. So was the transition something that was smooth? Or was it more like I'm done with this, I'm burnt out. And now I need to figure out a new idea.

Augie Johnston  

It was more smooth. I definitely was like, I want to figure out a new idea. But while I'm figuring out what's next, I'm also going to continue to release videos and run the business. And I also took the thing offline to the channel is called Baller Boot Camp. And it's still up today it's pretty abandoned, but- 

Omar  

You never sold the business? 

Augie Johnston  

Oh, I'm in the process of trying to make an exit with somebody who has an app like a basketball training app. 

Omar  

Sure. 

Augie Johnston  

It's called All Day. And that's kind of yeah, that's kind of been my goal. But it's been like a long process with that. But anyways, to answer your question, I'd been working on Baller Boot Camp for four years at that point, maybe five years at that point.

Throughout the whole time. I'm listening to podcasts like yours and I'm doing a whole lot of stuff like business podcasts and in learning the game. And one book that I read is by Dan Norris. And it's called The Seven Day Startup. 

Omar  

Great book. 

Augie Johnston  

Okay, you are definitely my brother from another mother if you've read that book. That's like my Bible and I... kids that I know, I buy it for them. I send it to people and...

Omar  

Really quick before you continue there, Design Pickle, I would assume? 

Augie Johnston  

Yes. 

Omar  

So the founder of Design Pickle had a pretty similar story with reading that book and wanted to start his own business, which I'm sure you've done a little bit of research from was your inspiration from the founder of Design Pickle to want to read that book, or did you find that on your own?

Augie Johnston  

No, I had found it on my own. And here's the kind of the full story. It's funny. You say Design Pickle. So I read that book in, the founder... It's basically about how to launch your business in seven days in, he's the founder of WP curve which later sold to GoDaddy, which basically just gives you 24/7 WordPress support. So there's the background there. 

But I'd read that book and I was like, I would love to come up with an idea like that. What are some of my pain points and I thought, hey, graphic design is a huge pain point that I have. I went, I bought this is probably 2010... 11, maybe 12. And I went and bought the domain minute graphics dot com. Alright, I'm going to launch an on demand graphic service domain. Yeah, minute graphics. And like everyone else, I sat on that domain, I never did anything with it a couple years pass. 

And then here comes Design Pickle. I've fallen in love with learning about their business for a year or two. And they're growing so rapidly. And so I'm like, okay, it's time. Let's launch Vidchops.

Omar  

Sure. Make sense. Do you feel like that on demand graphic design, video editing and whatever else? And I would assume really VAs are capable of type of service based businesses are becoming more saturated? Or do you think we're still very early on these kinds of platforms?

Augie Johnston  

It's definitely getting more competitive. I was actually the first ridgetops was the first flat service or flat rate -

Omar  

Video editing? 

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, video editing. Sorry. And so what we've seen from there is Yeah, like a lot of them have popped up and stuff. And is it saturated? No, it's not saturated. But someday, I think, yeah, it will get saturated at some point. 

But... it looks like an easy thing to do. But it's actually a lot more complicated to get going than you think maybe not as complicated as launching, I don't know, I would say launching in a SAAS product. But to be honest, we have some SAAS included as far as like, we have our own app and stuff. So...

Omar  

Sure, I think they all have their own complications, these kinds of business models. Whether it's SAS To be honest, I don't know the first thing about developing myself. So that's a whole like completely different worlds for me, even for my own product. I hired a developer to build it. 

But it's funny that you say Vidchops was the first one, there's another one that comes to mind when it comes to video editing services like yours is something that I like the business model of a while back and just caught my eye. Maybe they only started a year and a half ago, they called David Marketing. 

And this is not, if you're going to do any sort of video editing service, do not go with them go with Vidchops. Not that I know that much about them in the first place. But I have Auggie in front of me, he's a great guy. So go with Vidchops. 

But what do you think like differentiates someone, let's say with a service based business model, because all you guys, all your model is essentially is more turnkey than the average service based business becomes very turnkey with the product behind it. 

And systems in place and management systems and, and all sorts of different plans that you guys have in place, you don't have to work that much on your business. So what do you think differentiates someone like you guys versus like, David marketing? Not directly in the sense of that, Oh, you guys make better videos or any of that. But in general, any sort of on demand type service product like you guys have? What do you think is gonna differentiate one product versus another one?

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, I think like you said, the really and I'm gonna answer this question not the way you want it to. But when it comes to a client signing up for a service like this, and they say, Okay, I like this one more than the other. A lot of it does come down to the stuff like just meeting deadlines, delivering the quality edits, all that kind of stuff. 

For us, I would say, since we've been doing it for so long. And what differentiates us in the other realm would just be we have the experience of all the mistakes that we've made over the years. Sure. And all these other companies, they're still making these mistakes, and we see it often. 

And so, for example, there was a time when we like we weren't hitting our deadlines, our percentage of missed deadlines was I can't remember the exact number but like 10 20%, right 10 10% of the videos we deliver, we're missing a deadline by a day or something like that, or a couple hours for now, we've got that fixed now we'll go a whole month, we don't miss a single deadline, or maybe one deadline. And so that's huge. 

Also, too, like we we supply our editors with tons of assets we're talking about every editor gets an account to Motion Array, which is like a motion graphics thing. So they have basically unlimited motion graphics. Storyblocks, which is stock footage. Sound Strike for music, all that kind of stuff. 

So that's also something and and the last thing I would say is is everything, all these companies, right, they all have different ways of training their editors, and for us in for the fact that I understand YouTube, and I was a YouTuber, like we trained our editors to really optimize for talking head videos for YouTube videos. And so that's a big thing too. I'm not sure about these other ones. I haven't used them but like we understand the YouTube edit with the crop ins.

Omar  

Makes sense.

Augie Johnston  

Yeah. 

Omar  

See, I come from the really deep understanding of that the market that is available to everybody right now is massive, right? You even look at the biggest competitor in the space period in the on demand service space period, that's Design Pickle, they maybe have about, like 4000 5000 clients. 

And if you think about how many YouTubers there are out there, podcasters, or businesses that need graphic design, and we're looking somewhere in the upwards of hundreds of millions, right? So the market share is so massive that like, tomorrow, 20 different variations of design, people could come out and every single one of them would succeed, just because there's so many people out there. 

And graphic design isn't one of those things like a SAAS product, where it's there's no human element to it, when where you press a button and something pops out. And it can be scaled infinitely. It requires manpower, and creativity and all these different things.

 And you as the founder of that business, or the director of all that. So what differentiates I think, in my opinion, one business from another at the end of the day that follows that business model is really the experience like you said, and the person behind it. 

Augie Johnston  

Yeah.

Omar  

And what optimize what you guys have done optimizing to YouTube, I think definitely already gets you a leg up, especially in this day and age as the world moves towards a lot more social content, then your average video editing company that's maybe just editing videos for the business PowerPoint, and it's really good to see that and I want 100% stand by that kind of business model. I think it's phenomenal.

Augie Johnston  

Yeah. And just as far as like service businesses go in general, like I'm a huge fan of these flat rate services, like we use them in other worlds. We've talked about design, video editing, but there's also content writing, right? Content writing businesses. Are you familiar with something called Jarvis AI?

Omar  

Yeah, I've heard of it quite a bit recently. Actually, I still haven't tried it for myself, though. What do you think about it?

Augie Johnston  

It's incredible. Incredibly, yeah, it's so basically, this, they're one of their claim to fame is that they've scraped 10% of the internet for contracts. And they've ran it through and they ran that through their AI machine learning. And so basically, you can log into that app and you can type in video marketing, be funny, go. 

And it'll create whatever kind of framework you're using. Maybe you want an email, like an email pitch, and it'll write a whole email out for you in 20 1720 seconds, just like it spins for a second, then it goes and it's incredible. It's incredible. 

Omar  

Is the writing that good? 

Augie Johnston  

It's witty, it's funny, it's, it makes sense. There's sometimes not even a single typo, not a single grammar error. It's just perfect. And you won't believe it when... that there's not a person back there.

Omar  

Interesting.

Augie Johnston  

What I'm what I'm starting to see is and we're trying to head towards this way, too, is that you can have a writing service. Now that's a different that's a whole SAAS product, that's an app, but we use writing services where it is people behind the scenes, but I'm pretty sure at this point that they might be using some sort of technology. Like imagine combining Jarvis, your content writing service, now you can empower your writers. 

And like I said with us, although we use a project management tool we've developed for our to be an interface between our clients and our editors. 

Omar  

Sure. 

Augie Johnston  

And we're looking for ways like how can we make it easier for our clients or editors through this app, and one thing that we're focused on is improving the video review tool. So when you get a video back, we want our clients to be able to review it there. Right now we have timestamp comments. So as you watch it, it'll automatically timestamp we have like a YouTube video, good scrolling features frame by frame, stuff like that. But yeah, for us, that's like the next step is how do we integrate that

Omar  

Optimizations, similar to see I've got a creative agency on my back end as well, and actually do something quite similar to you hence why I know so much about the inside world of what you're doing. And that what you're mentioning right there where you're optimizing is actually so important. 

People don't realize that revision process of but what I noticed about your business model, and I did a little bit of research here is that you guys have a certain set number of deliverables you deliver each month right? Rather than other models. 

For example, Design Pickle does deliverables, too, but other models are like, Oh, you get this person for 10 hours a week. And then from there each week. This is how many hours you have with that person no matter how many revisions you want to make. So why pick the deliverable model rather than the...

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, that's a good question to me there's not really a great answer behind this it's just I feel like as a client as a customer that's what I would want to see. I don't want to just see Oh, unlimited unlimited Vidchops. What does that mean? Like how many is that and I feel like I'm getting screwed if maybe I'm only getting in some people do get screwed with that model. S

Some people are getting five videos a month, some people are getting 12 and I rather just put it's more for transparency thing for me to be more transparent. Okay, you can get eight to 12. With this plan, you can get 16 to 20 with this plan you can get whatever for with this plan. Yeah, and as a customer, I just feel like that's what I would want to see. So that's why we do it.

Omar  

Makes sense transparency. I get it. Especially In the video world where it's like a complex setup as opposed to something that's a little bit more simple like graphic design. So it makes a ton of sense man so what direction do you want to make this business go from here on, what's your plan? Do you want to scale it? Do you want to sell it? What do you want to do?

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, we we're constantly trying to scale it, it's just we haven't been able to get that, that that ad that will allow me to do that or whatever. But we've been seeing slow growth since the very beginning almost 2x every year. And the plan is to scale it we'd like this to be a $10 million a year business, 100 million dollar to build your business. 

And to do that I just think we need to continue to solve problems for Youtubers You know, that's our, that's our avatar. That's our dream client. As we go along. In our journey, I think there's more services like we talked about earlier, we do offer like a complete done for you service where they just upload the footage, we edit it, we upload it to YouTube, we create a thumbnail title tag, we schedule it for you, and it's all done. 

So that's like a newer service that we've included over the past year or two. And in the end, like I said, I just want to serve YouTubers, I want to help them come up with video topics. I want to help them figure out keywords and all that kind of stuff.

Omar  

Sure. Makes sense. What's your current marketing plan for Vidchops? And how did you get it to the point to where it was so far?

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, and our marketing plan has been all over the place. And over the years, we've dabbled in affiliates, and we still use affiliates. And that's always been a strategy for us we run ads you probably spend not a lot but maybe five to 10,000 a month on ads and then SEO. 

We have a blog that we run and recently we're doing a whole bunch of work on our website to speed it up for so that we can start to have faster page load times for SEO purposes. So that's been our plan to and yeah, just continue to grow an email list. I'd like to I'd like to create a newsletter. Are you familiar with a newsletter called The Hustle?

Omar  

Yeah, phenomenal, phenomenal page their contents are off the charts. Like -

Augie Johnston  

 Yeah.

Omar  

Their After Effects type content I love that stuff.

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, so the hustle right they it's like a tech newsletter it's over a million subscribers on there they actually sold to HubSpot recently for about 17 million. I would like to create something similar to that for you for the YouTuber video creator world as a way to just give value and as a marketing tool for Vidchops eventually and we haven't launched it yet but it's definitely in the works. 

And it's going to be almost like every issue is going to come with like an illustration almost to the far side or just old school comics basically.

Omar  

I like the vision.

Augie Johnston  

Yeah and then it's also going to be in as of now we have about six issues already written out it's basically income reports for youtubers I don't know about you personally do you enjoy looking at income reports?

Omar  

It's funny, like, me I'm curious about it about my favorite YouTubers but that's definitely a massive trend I've seen on YouTube that everyone just loves watching income report videos? So it makes sense.

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, and just like ever since I've been online over 10 years ago doesn't matter what it was a blog posts anybody that's making money online I love looking inside their business and seeing how much money they're making from this and that.

I've always been a fan of income reports so every issues in income report on a YouTuber and I won't talk too much about it but I'm excited about it because number one the comic part right ? The the newsletter is told from the voice of a lab rat instead of a cage so I know this is getting a little out there now but...

Omar  

I like the creative vision, I like it. 

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, so there's some creativity behind it. Like inspired from a cartoon called Pinky and the Brain. Yeah, it's like one of those and in this lab rats basically just breaking down YouTube and that's it's I'm excited for so that's as far as marketing goes. That's like a big thing we're doing in the near future.

Omar  

That's cool stuff. We're gonna add some culture and bring in a lot of YouTubers into your fold that way too. I think it's a good idea for sure. I'm always like skeptical about newsletters these days. Unless you're done really well and that sounds like it's done really [well].

Augie Johnston  

It's going to be one where it's like a weekly thing you get one a week or maybe two a week and not promotional in any way every newsletter nowadays, it's a promotional newsletter and as soon as you get in there you're getting the first sequence is going to be the indoctrination sequence that tells you all about the company the second sequence is going to be some sort of sale with a timer on the page we all know that. 

And we use that too. Its best practiced for email marketing, but at the same time it's not valuable and people are unsubscribing from that and it's not as pleasant experience so so this is going to be something where we take our vid chops email subscribers and at the end we say hey, looks like you're not interested in vid chops at this time. No worries. Would you be interested in jumping on this email list where you're gonna get value entertainment and just an inside look of what it's like to be a full time youtuber and tips too. 

And so that's the strategy because we're getting all these inbound email addresses while building Vidchops, but I don't want to continue to run sales to them after they've gone through 30 days of promotions, which helps right what do you do at that point, with My old one baller boot camp. We just kept pushing products, I sold you out 11 products. 

So every month we were doing a new sale on a new product. And it was it works. I don't get you the sales. But it's not like in the vape shops world like these people are a little bit more internet savvy in a little bit more marketing savvy, like they know that they don't appreciate that, I guess as much as I want to do something with value.

Omar  

Make sense? That's always the way to lead. Right? That's always a way to go forward. That's really ultimately whether you wanted it or not. Customers come to you like moths to a flame because you were leading with value from the beginning. 

So I see the newsletter doing really well. What do I know, every day something surprises me in digital marketing. But from what it sounds like it's sounds super creative, and it sounds super dope. And I think it's gonna be really cool. 

Augie Johnston  

Appreciate that. 

Omar  

Yeah. Yeah, so continuing growing Vidchops seems to be like your bread and butter now. It seems to be your passion project, and also your main business and everything in between, it seems like you're giving it your all. What do you do outside of business? 

And this is something that I've been wanting to touch on more recently on some of my podcasts just because as entrepreneurs I think we can get too caught up in our own babies or on businesses and forget about the outside world sometimes. At least in my case.

So what are some things that you do outside of your business? Do you still play basketball? What do you do to relax? Do you travel? what's what's your day to day?

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, and I can totally relate with what you just said. As far as like being inside of our own box. A lot of us are solopreneurs or working from home in our spare bedroom, we're on a computer we get up we don't brush our teeth yet. Sometimes we don't do anything till we're on our computer and then all sudden it's 11:30. And we're two cup cups of coffee in and we haven't brushed our teeth or we haven't done our hair we get out we do that. And then we go back on the computer and all sudden it's night-time. 

And really did you go grab dinner with somebody you get home and then you're back on the computer. I outside of my business I do... I do a lot of stuff. But the main thing that takes the most time is I'm a basketball coach. So the local I live in my hometown that I grew up in, and I'm the varsity basketball coach here. 

Yeah, we spend a lot of time in the gym with the kids and stuff and I really trying to pass on whatever knowledge I have to the next generation. It's a fun thing to do. And I get to be around the game still. And yeah, the way I live my life is I can't just do anything like half speed at dive all the way in. 

In high school. I wanted to be a rapper, and my parents probably weren't too excited. I was 16 years old. And this is the first time that I really learned computers, right? Listen, I'm a producer, I'm making beats and one year later, I've got 100 songs recorded. I've done five shows like I'm one of those guys that refuse to do so. Yeah, I'm pretty obsessive. 

That's what it's like with the coaching stuff. And with Vidchops right now, we got three youth teams that we're trying to bring up like sixth graders, seventh graders, eighth graders, and then obviously, the whole varsity program and in the whole high school program.

Omar  

Sure.

Augie Johnston  

 I feel like it's good for it to hit three o'clock, 3pm get off the computer. Let's go to practice. Let's spend two hours doing something that's active. And then at the computers always there afterwards.

Omar  

I'm always surprised what I hear for the for the answers for this question, right? Like the second life that person's leading outside of their business, and there's always something better and the fact that you're still a basketball coach, and obviously you don't need to be a basketball coach for the..

Because not with have any employees and stuff, you have a rough idea of how much you're making, because I'm in that world as well. So you definitely don't need to be a basketball coach. But you do it because you enjoy it. And you get to be around the game and you get to inspire young kids just like you that were your you were their age one. 

So it's really cool to be able to see that. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs in general should make more time to do the things that bring them that joy, that basketball brings you.

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, and also it's good to have a player on my team. That's he moved here and we just go looking for what's next for him and stuff. And he joins the basketball team. And now he's a full blown videographer, because he's just kind of picking my brain. What about this? What about this, and he's watched the podcast, he bought two DSLR cameras. 

He's going around now. And there's a local university here Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He's already out there shooting videos for their basketball team and all this kind of stuff. So I love - that's the ultimate right? 

Like my passions of Youtuber, digital marketing, and all that kinds of being passed on to someone like that. Like, I pray someday that he moves back here and he could work for me. But we'll see.

Omar  

Sure. Inspiring the younger generation to be creative, man. That's really why we do what we do. 

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, definitely.

Omar  

So I got one final question for you here that I want to close the podcasts off with. It's the signature question that I mentioned earlier. I, it's funny, I was at my friend's house, who was actually on this podcast ages ago, and that's how I met him. I was at his house like two days ago, and his dad listens to every one of my podcast. Shout out to you, Rod! Every single one. 

And one of my recent episodes that I released he said you forgot to do your signature question at the end of it. Made me laugh so hard. So because of that comment, I don't think I'm ever gonna forget again. 

So here's the question, right? If you had a billboard in space, and on that billboard, you could write whatever you wanted. And every single time the sun went up, everyone on planet Earth could see that Billboard and some universal language. And every time the sun went away, the billboard went away for the night. What would you write on that billboard?

Augie Johnston  

Wow, that is so deep. I know the answer. I'm just trying to see how I want to phrase it, I think it would be three words, and it would just say Time Is Everything. 

Because I'm a big advocate of appreciating the time that you have, because even with COVID, I personally know three people where I've shook their hands, and they're not here anymorebecause of COVID, they actually did pass away and, and so that time is not promised. 

And now that I have a son, I have an 18 month old son. I'm like looking at time, like totally different, because I want to spend time with him. Like before, I was one of those people, I don't want to live until I'm 90. I don't wanna live until I'm a hundred and just be bedridden or whatever. But like, now, I actually do want that time like now I actually do want to live to be 100 because I want to see my son one just one more time with my son, I want those days. 

I wish I would have had kids a little bit earlier, because then I would have been able to get more years with them. Time is really all we have. And when you wake up in the morning, you're a lot of that amount of time and it's your choice on how you want to spend it. And everyone spends it in different ways. 

But if you spend it the right way, then your name can live on forever. If you spend your time the right way, Kobe Bryant, your name will live on forever. And so we only get a certain amount of time on this planet so use it wisely.

Omar  

Good allusion to Kobe Bryant there. 

Augie Johnston  

Yeah.

Omar  

Yeah, yeah. Rest in peace. 

Augie Johnston  

Yeah. 

Omar  

Fantastic way to end the episode. Very beautifully said. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Augie Johnston  

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been fun.

Omar  

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Outro  

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